Frankie Celenza's new show, Worth the Hype, premiering Wednesday at 7 p.m. EDT on the Tastemade streaming channel, interviews restaurant chefs and their customers to learn if trendy local restaurants or food trucks live up to their reputation.

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The restaurants invite Celenza into the kitchen to learn their methods. In Austin, Texas, for example, Celenza struggled to make tortillas with the pros, and has a variety of experiences preparing cuisine in other cities.

"I made ramen noodles with a $40,000 machine," Celenza told UPI in a recent Zoom interview. "Their pH level is pretty low, so you add alkaline to it."

Celenza visited restaurants in Los Angeles and San Diego, Austin and San Antonio, Texas, and Manhattan and Brooklyn, N.Y..The Brooklyn episode features four eateries, each with a different approach to preparing it.

"We had a wood-fired oven," Celenza said. "We had an electric oven made in Sweden that gets to 1,000 degrees. We had a coal-fired oven, and then we had a traditional baker's pride, gas-fired oven. Each one yields a different pie."

After learning how to cook the meals, Celenza interviews customers for their reactions. He said he may spend 45 minutes talking to them and edit it down to under a minute.

"It's all improv," Celenz said. "We're just chit-chatting."

In general, Celenza said the Worth the Hype crew spends five to six hours in each restaurant and films for two days in each city. The production chose pairs of cities in the same state to streamline travel.

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If Worth the Hype is successful, Celenza already is thinking of pairs of cities he could visit in Season 2. Portland, Ore,. and Seattle or the Twin Cities.

"I am totally down for going international," Celenza said. "We don't have to go far, but I feel like Toronto and Montreal would be nice. [Maybe],British Columbia."

Celenza also suggested Charleston, S.C., Atlanta and the states of Virginia, Maine or Vermont.

"At the end of the day, it's a show about food, but it's also a show about travel," Celenz said. "It's also a show about how people live in these places."

Interacting with others is a change of pace from Celenza's other Tastemade show, Struggle Meals, now entering its ninth season. Struggle Meals presents Celenza alone on camera demonstrating inexpensive meals the viewer can cook.

"This format is like breathing all kinds of energy into me," Celenza said. "I pop in, new people, new place, new food, and I have a ton of energy to find out as much as I can."

Celenza could continue to host both shows indefinitely. Struggle Meals films in the fall and spring leaving winter and summer open for Worth the Hype.

Struggle Meals returns Sept. 21. The new season includes the 100th episode, which Celenza said would include clips of "the best of Struggle Meals and bloopers throughout the years."

Celenza developed his cooking and hosting skills while at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where he studied music performance. Celenza sang backup and played guitar in bands that have disbanded.

"I would cook these dishes at home for people," Celenz said. "Then, I started undercutting my school's meal plan by a dollar."

Celenza's satisfied customers suggested he film himself cooking their meals, so he created the YouTube show, Frankie Cooks. He enlisted Juilliard musicians to score his episodes, including saxophone player Braxton Cook, hip-hop artist and producer Ivan Jackson, drummer Jimmy McBride and bassist Joshua Crumbly.

Celenza developed further production skills through summer jobs for Radical Media and Outpost post-production houses three years in a row. When Radical prepared the Mad Men pilot, titled "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes," Celenza learned the AVID editing system.

"I watched 'Smoke Gets in your Eyes' with the whole cast praying that the thing wouldn't crash, because if it did, I didn't actually know what to do," Celenza said.

For fans following Celenza's cooking shows, Celenza said Worth the Hype offers even lower maintenance than Struggle Meals. The viewer doesn't even need to cook the Worth the Hype meals.

"This is a great opportunity for you to eat what you see on screen because all you have to do is go to the place that is Worth the Hype," Celenza said.